Google
is an American multinational technology company specializing in
Internet-related services and products that include online advertising
technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google
is an American multinational technology company specializing in
Internet-related services and products that include online advertising
technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Facebook and Google: Most Powerful and Secretive Empires we've Ever Known -We need better language to describe the technology companies that control the digital worlds in which we speak, play and live.
Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles Wednesday 28 September 2016 08.00 BST
Google
and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just
about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t
know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power.
We
call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly
fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as
vast empires, they are unlike any we’ve ever known. Far from being
discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding
the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.
As
their users, we are like the blinkered young fish in the parable
memorably retold by David Foster Wallace. When asked “How’s the water?”
we swipe blank: “What the hell is water?”
We pay attention,
sometimes, to racism, death threats, outrage. Other than that, we have
barely started feeling their algorithmic undertow. We have trouble
grasping the scope of it: the vast server farms, the job cuts, the
barriers to entry, the public-private partnerships, the manufacturing of
data, the knowing cities, the branded self, the slavish service to
their metrics, the monoculture.
Google is not an “engine” that simply drives us to an objectively correct destination and then sits inert, like one of the cars that it seeks to replace with its new ride-sharing service.
Facebook
is not merely a “network” for connection, like the old phone network or
electrical grid, as if it had no agency, and did not take a piece of
every last interaction (or false start) between friends. When and
how much we interact, we rely on Facebook to say. These are not mere
“edge providers”, peripheral to infrastructure, or mere “applications”
that we can select or refuse.
Emily Bell, founding director of
the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, offered up a more active image:
“Facebook is eating the world” (http://iparrorratztic.blogspot.com/2017/01/facebook-is-eating-world.html). She was concerned with the silos of
power controlling how news is published and distributed. But the image
she conjured of a ravenous engine of consumption suggested something
more than mere media concentration.
Characterizing Facebook or Google as powerful media organs – even the most powerful – actually understates their power.
Marshall McLuhan, 60 years ago, gave us another, fuller understanding
of media. Electric light is a medium “totally radical, pervasive, and
decentralized” that appears to us as media only when constituted into
video content. Electrical current itself completely changes our
relationship to the world and, in the process, reconstitutes us. A
medium is not merely something that feeds us content. It is a condition
like air or water, through which we move without noticing.
The analogy captures part of what is happening, but goes even further. Facebook
and Google are not only carrying us, but constituting us. We are, in
fact, their media. Geared as they are to sharing, clicking and eyeballs,
these media do not measure and do not value solitary contemplation,
reflection and disconnection. They thrive and pulse on popularity, not
veracity. They feed on extremes, not common causes.
Summer
2016 was riddled with anxiety about the power of social media to propel
public discourse and mob opinion in dangerous directions, and the
failure of traditional media to check it.
The echo chamber of
social media magnified the appeal of Trump and Brexit to the casualties
of globalization and free trade. What remained of the traditional media
lacked the interest – because truth-telling is expensive and boring – or
wherewithal – because they have no money, and fading influence – to
effectively call out the lies spreading like algae over the warming
western world. Sometimes the old papers came through with quality
reporting, but mere facts are rarely sufficient to survive the torrent
of the digital slipstream.
There is the ongoing conflict over
these companies’ self-identification as mere “technology” businesses,
and the media critics’ charge that they are “media companies”. The
issue being debated is usually whether Facebook or Google produce
content or make editorial decisions, and in that sense constitute media.
It’s hardly worth debating: of course they produce content, if only by
algorithmically selecting, prioritizing and presenting.
But
Facebook is so much more than a media company. Traditional media
companies sell advertising “real estate” and independent entities like
Nielsen or the Alliance for Audited Media assess the value. Facebook
plays both sides: it offers real estate (video advertising) and provides
the assessments (viewership data). Not surprisingly, Facebook makes
mistakes. There is no auditing, no independence; we simply take
Facebook’s word for it, when and how much the errors occur. Like
Poseidon, FB blows, the currents move, and content producers and
advertisers are swept in new directions.
Public opinion seems to
vacillate between valorizing and excoriating the digital empires. The
empire is seen as bad when it interrupts the supposed neutrality of
content with human hacks such as Facebook news modifications and
trending topics curation (the latter now fully automated, Facebook
claims). And it is seen as good when Facebook intervenes in supposedly
responsible causes like Google’s elimination of payday loan ads or
Facebook’s promotion of voting.
Or is it? We’re not sure. Because
some experts think payday loans are not the real problem – it’s low
wages – and Facebook’s promotion of democratic participation may be
selective and skewed. If Facebook is good when it livecasts police
shootings to hold government to account, is it also good when it
partners with government to prevent terrorism? We assess the benevolence
of empire on a case-by-case basis, influenced by normative commitments
and superficial detail. What we don’t do is exercise some control or even suasion over the power these companies have to do anything and everything.
We enjoy the bounty of their empire. Free services, easy communication. The ever-expanding convenience of commerce.
We
leave it to the media companies to worry about the empire’s tribute for
this bounty: most of the advertising dollars that once went to support
journalism, leaving the papers vassal to their feudal protectors.
The metaphors that we use – empire, medium, undertow – allude to the power of the all-knowing digital companies. Speaking
clearly about this power and its effects is critical. Ultimately, the
public needs more voice, more choice, more power. In the near term, we
should pursue algorithmic accountability, independent auditing and
consumer protection scrutiny, before we lose our agency as a public that
is something other than their “user base.”
We can not allow them to be the ones who mold our world.
Facebook and Google: Most Powerful and Secretive Empires we've Ever Known -We need better language to describe the technology companies that control the digital worlds in which we speak, play and live.
Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles Wednesday 28 September 2016 08.00 BST
Google
and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just
about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t
know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power.
We
call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly
fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as
vast empires, they are unlike any we’ve ever known. Far from being
discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding
the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.
As
their users, we are like the blinkered young fish in the parable
memorably retold by David Foster Wallace. When asked “How’s the water?”
we swipe blank: “What the hell is water?”
We pay attention,
sometimes, to racism, death threats, outrage. Other than that, we have
barely started feeling their algorithmic undertow. We have trouble
grasping the scope of it: the vast server farms, the job cuts, the
barriers to entry, the public-private partnerships, the manufacturing of
data, the knowing cities, the branded self, the slavish service to
their metrics, the monoculture.
Google is not an “engine” that simply drives us to an objectively correct destination and then sits inert, like one of the cars that it seeks to replace with its new ride-sharing service.
Facebook
is not merely a “network” for connection, like the old phone network or
electrical grid, as if it had no agency, and did not take a piece of
every last interaction (or false start) between friends. When and
how much we interact, we rely on Facebook to say. These are not mere
“edge providers”, peripheral to infrastructure, or mere “applications”
that we can select or refuse.
Emily Bell, founding director of
the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, offered up a more active image:
“Facebook is eating the world” (http://iparrorratztic.blogspot.com/2017/01/facebook-se-esta-tragando-el-mundo.html). She was concerned with the silos of
power controlling how news is published and distributed. But the image
she conjured of a ravenous engine of consumption suggested something
more than mere media concentration.
Characterizing Facebook or Google as powerful media organs – even the most powerful – actually understates their power.
Marshall McLuhan, 60 years ago, gave us another, fuller understanding
of media. Electric light is a medium “totally radical, pervasive, and
decentralized” that appears to us as media only when constituted into
video content. Electrical current itself completely changes our
relationship to the world and, in the process, reconstitutes us. A
medium is not merely something that feeds us content. It is a condition
like air or water, through which we move without noticing.
The analogy captures part of what is happening, but goes even further. Facebook
and Google are not only carrying us, but constituting us. We are, in
fact, their media. Geared as they are to sharing, clicking and eyeballs,
these media do not measure and do not value solitary contemplation,
reflection and disconnection. They thrive and pulse on popularity, not
veracity. They feed on extremes, not common causes.
Summer
2016 was riddled with anxiety about the power of social media to propel
public discourse and mob opinion in dangerous directions, and the
failure of traditional media to check it.
The echo chamber of
social media magnified the appeal of Trump and Brexit to the casualties
of globalization and free trade. What remained of the traditional media
lacked the interest – because truth-telling is expensive and boring – or
wherewithal – because they have no money, and fading influence – to
effectively call out the lies spreading like algae over the warming
western world. Sometimes the old papers came through with quality
reporting, but mere facts are rarely sufficient to survive the torrent
of the digital slipstream.
There is the ongoing conflict over
these companies’ self-identification as mere “technology” businesses,
and the media critics’ charge that they are “media companies”. The
issue being debated is usually whether Facebook or Google produce
content or make editorial decisions, and in that sense constitute media.
It’s hardly worth debating: of course they produce content, if only by
algorithmically selecting, prioritizing and presenting.
But
Facebook is so much more than a media company. Traditional media
companies sell advertising “real estate” and independent entities like
Nielsen or the Alliance for Audited Media assess the value. Facebook
plays both sides: it offers real estate (video advertising) and provides
the assessments (viewership data). Not surprisingly, Facebook makes
mistakes. There is no auditing, no independence; we simply take
Facebook’s word for it, when and how much the errors occur. Like
Poseidon, FB blows, the currents move, and content producers and
advertisers are swept in new directions.
Public opinion seems to
vacillate between valorizing and excoriating the digital empires. The
empire is seen as bad when it interrupts the supposed neutrality of
content with human hacks such as Facebook news modifications and
trending topics curation (the latter now fully automated, Facebook
claims). And it is seen as good when Facebook intervenes in supposedly
responsible causes like Google’s elimination of payday loan ads or
Facebook’s promotion of voting.
Or is it? We’re not sure. Because
some experts think payday loans are not the real problem – it’s low
wages – and Facebook’s promotion of democratic participation may be
selective and skewed. If Facebook is good when it livecasts police
shootings to hold government to account, is it also good when it
partners with government to prevent terrorism? We assess the benevolence
of empire on a case-by-case basis, influenced by normative commitments
and superficial detail. What we don’t do is exercise some control or even suasion over the power these companies have to do anything and everything.
We enjoy the bounty of their empire. Free services, easy communication. The ever-expanding convenience of commerce.
We
leave it to the media companies to worry about the empire’s tribute for
this bounty: most of the advertising dollars that once went to support
journalism, leaving the papers vassal to their feudal protectors.
The metaphors that we use – empire, medium, undertow – allude to the power of the all-knowing digital companies. Speaking
clearly about this power and its effects is critical. Ultimately, the
public needs more voice, more choice, more power. In the near term, we
should pursue algorithmic accountability, independent auditing and
consumer protection scrutiny, before we lose our agency as a public that
is something other than their “user base.”
No podemos permitirles ser quienes moldeen nuestro mundo.
Facebook and Google: Most Powerful and Secretive Empires we've Ever Known -We need better language to describe the technology companies that control the digital worlds in which we speak, play and live.
Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles Wednesday 28 September 2016 08.00 BST
Google and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power.
We call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as vast empires, they are unlike any we’ve ever known. Far from being discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.
As their users, we are like the blinkered young fish in the parable memorably retold by David Foster Wallace. When asked “How’s the water?” we swipe blank: “What the hell is water?”
We pay attention, sometimes, to racism, death threats, outrage. Other than that, we have barely started feeling their algorithmic undertow. We have trouble grasping the scope of it: the vast server farms, the job cuts, the barriers to entry, the public-private partnerships, the manufacturing of data, the knowing cities, the branded self, the slavish service to their metrics, the monoculture.
Google is not an “engine” that simply drives us to an objectively correct destination and then sits inert, like one of the cars that it seeks to replace with its new ride-sharing service.
Facebook is not merely a “network” for connection, like the old phone network or electrical grid, as if it had no agency, and did not take a piece of every last interaction (or false start) between friends. When and how much we interact, we rely on Facebook to say. These are not mere “edge providers”, peripheral to infrastructure, or mere “applications” that we can select or refuse.
Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, offered up a more active image: “Facebook is eating the world” (http://iparrorratztic.blogspot.com/2017/01/facebook-mundua-irensten-ari-da.html). She was concerned with the silos of power controlling how news is published and distributed. But the image she conjured of a ravenous engine of consumption suggested something more than mere media concentration.
Characterizing Facebook or Google as powerful media organs – even the most powerful – actually understates their power. Marshall McLuhan, 60 years ago, gave us another, fuller understanding of media. Electric light is a medium “totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized” that appears to us as media only when constituted into video content. Electrical current itself completely changes our relationship to the world and, in the process, reconstitutes us. A medium is not merely something that feeds us content. It is a condition like air or water, through which we move without noticing.
The analogy captures part of what is happening, but goes even further. Facebook and Google are not only carrying us, but constituting us. We are, in fact, their media. Geared as they are to sharing, clicking and eyeballs, these media do not measure and do not value solitary contemplation, reflection and disconnection. They thrive and pulse on popularity, not veracity. They feed on extremes, not common causes.
Summer 2016 was riddled with anxiety about the power of social media to propel public discourse and mob opinion in dangerous directions, and the failure of traditional media to check it.
The echo chamber of social media magnified the appeal of Trump and Brexit to the casualties of globalization and free trade. What remained of the traditional media lacked the interest – because truth-telling is expensive and boring – or wherewithal – because they have no money, and fading influence – to effectively call out the lies spreading like algae over the warming western world. Sometimes the old papers came through with quality reporting, but mere facts are rarely sufficient to survive the torrent of the digital slipstream.
There is the ongoing conflict over these companies’ self-identification as mere “technology” businesses, and the media critics’ charge that they are “media companies”. The issue being debated is usually whether Facebook or Google produce content or make editorial decisions, and in that sense constitute media. It’s hardly worth debating: of course they produce content, if only by algorithmically selecting, prioritizing and presenting.
But Facebook is so much more than a media company. Traditional media companies sell advertising “real estate” and independent entities like Nielsen or the Alliance for Audited Media assess the value. Facebook plays both sides: it offers real estate (video advertising) and provides the assessments (viewership data). Not surprisingly, Facebook makes mistakes. There is no auditing, no independence; we simply take Facebook’s word for it, when and how much the errors occur. Like Poseidon, FB blows, the currents move, and content producers and advertisers are swept in new directions.
Public opinion seems to vacillate between valorizing and excoriating the digital empires. The empire is seen as bad when it interrupts the supposed neutrality of content with human hacks such as Facebook news modifications and trending topics curation (the latter now fully automated, Facebook claims). And it is seen as good when Facebook intervenes in supposedly responsible causes like Google’s elimination of payday loan ads or Facebook’s promotion of voting.
Or is it? We’re not sure. Because some experts think payday loans are not the real problem – it’s low wages – and Facebook’s promotion of democratic participation may be selective and skewed. If Facebook is good when it livecasts police shootings to hold government to account, is it also good when it partners with government to prevent terrorism? We assess the benevolence of empire on a case-by-case basis, influenced by normative commitments and superficial detail. What we don’t do is exercise some control or even suasion over the power these companies have to do anything and everything.
We enjoy the bounty of their empire. Free services, easy communication. The ever-expanding convenience of commerce.
We leave it to the media companies to worry about the empire’s tribute for this bounty: most of the advertising dollars that once went to support journalism, leaving the papers vassal to their feudal protectors.
The metaphors that we use – empire, medium, undertow – allude to the power of the all-knowing digital companies. Speaking clearly about this power and its effects is critical. Ultimately, the public needs more voice, more choice, more power. In the near term, we should pursue algorithmic accountability, independent auditing and consumer protection scrutiny, before we lose our agency as a public that is something other than their “user base.”
Gure mundua moldatuko duten horiek izatea ezin diegu utzi.
Facebook is eating the world By Emily Bell March 7, 2016
Something
really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere,
and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly
without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news
ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than
perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps
in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially
intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are
seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of
our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the
destiny of many.
Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this
heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information,
and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential
risks.
Journalism is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but one of central interest to citizens.
The
internet and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work,
while at the same time helping to make the business of publishing
journalism an uneconomic venture.
Two significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention to:
First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.
Social
media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have
built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through
algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news
business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like
BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that
they are working within this system, not against it.
Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.
The
largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple,
Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter,
Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely
powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how
that publication is monetized.
There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks
favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media
markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics
and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies
are failing.
The mobile revolution is behind much of this.
Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded.
The
design and capabilities of our phones (thank you, Apple) favor apps,
which foster different behavior. Google did recent research through its
Android platform that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps
on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, and of
those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of our time is
spent on a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is
far greater than any other social platform.
The majority of
American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users
regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew
Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.
So let’s recap: -People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything. -They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter. -The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.
The competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse”- Google,
Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in Microsoft) - are
engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies,
platforms, and even ideologies will win.
In the last year,
journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found
themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict.
In the past year,
Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice,
BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook
launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up
to all publishers in April. Apple and Google quickly followed suit,
launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not
wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an
aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete
stories about events.
It is very good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.
At
the same time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly
into apps and new systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile
audiences, Apple announced it would allow ad-blocking software to be
downloaded from its App store.
In other words, if as a publisher
your alternative to going onto a distributed platform is to make money
through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block all ads
and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within
platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook,
are largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the
already very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might
be getting independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course,
one might add that publishers had it coming from weighing down their
pages with intrusive ads nobody wanted in the first place.
There are three alternatives for commercial publishers.
One is to push even more of your journalism straight to an app
like Facebook and its Instant Articles where ad blocking is not
impossible but harder than at the browser level. As one publisher put it
to me, “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect
that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be
better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on the revenue and
traffic from one distributor, are very high.
The second option is to build other businesses and revenues away
from distributed platforms. Accept that seeking a vast audience through
other platforms is not only not helping you but actively damaging your
journalism, so move to a measurement of audience engagement rather than
scale.
Membership or subscription are most commonly considered in
this context. Ironically, the prerequisites for this are having a
strong brand identity that subscribers feel affinity towards. In a world
where content is highly distributed, this is far harder to achieve than
when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in the handful of
cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up the
shortfall in advertising.
The third is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all,
so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or
“sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has
grown to nearly a quarter of all digital display advertising in the US.
In fact, digitally native companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, and hybrids like
Vice, have disrupted the failing publishing model by essentially
becoming advertising agencies—which are themselves in danger of failing.
What I mean by this is that they deal directly with advertisers, they
make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we see scattered all over
our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all those people who
have previously “liked” or shared other material from that publisher.
The
logical answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest
in their own destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app
has to be compliant with the distribution standards of others in order
to work. And investing in maintaining your own presence comes at a time
when advertising (particularly in print) is under pressure, and online
advertising is not growing either. The critical balance between
destination and distribution is probably the hardest investment decision
traditional publishers have to make right now.
Publishers are
reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four
times the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go
“all in” on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism
and stories that work on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can
imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production
capacity, technology capacity, and even advertising departments, and
delegating it all to third-party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat.
This is a high-risk strategy: You
lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your
revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination.
With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online everyday, social
platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the
important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this.
In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news.
If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better
than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we
observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into
the internal working of these systems.
There are huge benefits to
having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially
successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over
functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically
entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the
past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.
We
are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private
lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and
unaccountable.
We need regulation to make sure all
citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services
they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression
will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally.
This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.
For
this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the
responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these
platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the
responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that
this is the outcome of their engineering success.
One of the
criticisms thus far leveled against these companies is that they have
cherry-picked the profitable parts of the publishing process and
sidestepped the more expensive business of actually creating good
journalism. If the current nascent experiments such as Instant Articles
lead to a more integrated relationship with journalism, it is possible
that we will see a more significant shift of production costs follow,
particularly around technology and advertising sales.
The
reintermediation of information, which once looked as though it was
going to be fully democratized by the progress of the open Web, is
likely to make the mechanisms for funding journalism worse before they
get better. Looking at the prospects for mobile advertising and the
aggressive growth targets Apple, Facebook, Google, and the rest have to
meet to satisfy Wall Street, it is fair to say that unless social
platforms return a great deal more money back to the source, producing
news is likely to become a nonprofit pursuit rather than an engine of
capitalism.
To be sustainable, news and journalism companies will
need to radically alter their cost base. It seems most likely that the
next wave of news media companies will be fashioned around a studio
model of managing different stories, talents, and products across a vast
range of devices and platforms. As this shift happens, posting
journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule
rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned
in favor of hyperdistribution. The distinction between platforms and
publishers will melt completely.
Even if you think of yourself as
a technology company, you are making critical decisions about
everything from access to platforms, the shape of journalism or speech,
the inclusion or banning of certain content, the acceptance or rejection
of various publishers.
What happens to the current class of news publishers is a much less important question than what kind of a news and information society we want to create and how can we help shape this.
Facebook is eating the world By Emily Bell March 7, 2016
Something
really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere,
and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly
without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news
ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than
perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps
in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially
intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are
seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of
our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the
destiny of many.
Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this
heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information,
and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential
risks.
Journalism is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but one of central interest to citizens.
The
internet and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work,
while at the same time helping to make the business of publishing
journalism an uneconomic venture.
Two significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention to:
First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.
Social
media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have
built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through
algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news
business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like
BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that
they are working within this system, not against it.
Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.
The
largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple,
Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter,
Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely
powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how
that publication is monetized.
There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks
favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media
markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics
and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies
are failing.
The mobile revolution is behind much of this.
Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded.
The
design and capabilities of our phones (thank you, Apple) favor apps,
which foster different behavior. Google did recent research through its
Android platform that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps
on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, and of
those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of our time is
spent on a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is
far greater than any other social platform.
The majority of
American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users
regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew
Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.
So let’s recap: -People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything. -They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter. -The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.
The competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse”- Google,
Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in Microsoft) - are
engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies,
platforms, and even ideologies will win.
In the last year,
journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found
themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict.
In the past year,
Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice,
BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook
launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up
to all publishers in April. Apple and Google quickly followed suit,
launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not
wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an
aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete
stories about events.
It is very good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.
At
the same time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly
into apps and new systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile
audiences, Apple announced it would allow ad-blocking software to be
downloaded from its App store.
In other words, if as a publisher
your alternative to going onto a distributed platform is to make money
through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block all ads
and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within
platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook,
are largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the
already very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might
be getting independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course,
one might add that publishers had it coming from weighing down their
pages with intrusive ads nobody wanted in the first place.
There are three alternatives for commercial publishers.
One is to push even more of your journalism straight to an app
like Facebook and its Instant Articles where ad blocking is not
impossible but harder than at the browser level. As one publisher put it
to me, “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect
that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be
better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on the revenue and
traffic from one distributor, are very high.
The second option is to build other businesses and revenues away
from distributed platforms. Accept that seeking a vast audience through
other platforms is not only not helping you but actively damaging your
journalism, so move to a measurement of audience engagement rather than
scale.
Membership or subscription are most commonly considered in
this context. Ironically, the prerequisites for this are having a
strong brand identity that subscribers feel affinity towards. In a world
where content is highly distributed, this is far harder to achieve than
when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in the handful of
cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up the
shortfall in advertising.
The third is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all,
so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or
“sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has
grown to nearly a quarter of all digital display advertising in the US.
In fact, digitally native companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, and hybrids like
Vice, have disrupted the failing publishing model by essentially
becoming advertising agencies—which are themselves in danger of failing.
What I mean by this is that they deal directly with advertisers, they
make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we see scattered all over
our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all those people who
have previously “liked” or shared other material from that publisher.
The
logical answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest
in their own destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app
has to be compliant with the distribution standards of others in order
to work. And investing in maintaining your own presence comes at a time
when advertising (particularly in print) is under pressure, and online
advertising is not growing either. The critical balance between
destination and distribution is probably the hardest investment decision
traditional publishers have to make right now.
Publishers are
reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four
times the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go
“all in” on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism
and stories that work on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can
imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production
capacity, technology capacity, and even advertising departments, and
delegating it all to third-party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat.
This is a high-risk strategy: You
lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your
revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination.
With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online everyday, social
platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the
important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this.
In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news.
If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better
than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we
observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into
the internal working of these systems.
There are huge benefits to
having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially
successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over
functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically
entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the
past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.
We
are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private
lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and
unaccountable.
We need regulation to make sure all
citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services
they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression
will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally.
This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.
For
this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the
responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these
platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the
responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that
this is the outcome of their engineering success.
One of the
criticisms thus far leveled against these companies is that they have
cherry-picked the profitable parts of the publishing process and
sidestepped the more expensive business of actually creating good
journalism. If the current nascent experiments such as Instant Articles
lead to a more integrated relationship with journalism, it is possible
that we will see a more significant shift of production costs follow,
particularly around technology and advertising sales.
The
reintermediation of information, which once looked as though it was
going to be fully democratized by the progress of the open Web, is
likely to make the mechanisms for funding journalism worse before they
get better. Looking at the prospects for mobile advertising and the
aggressive growth targets Apple, Facebook, Google, and the rest have to
meet to satisfy Wall Street, it is fair to say that unless social
platforms return a great deal more money back to the source, producing
news is likely to become a nonprofit pursuit rather than an engine of
capitalism.
To be sustainable, news and journalism companies will
need to radically alter their cost base. It seems most likely that the
next wave of news media companies will be fashioned around a studio
model of managing different stories, talents, and products across a vast
range of devices and platforms. As this shift happens, posting
journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule
rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned
in favor of hyperdistribution. The distinction between platforms and
publishers will melt completely.
Even if you think of yourself as
a technology company, you are making critical decisions about
everything from access to platforms, the shape of journalism or speech,
the inclusion or banning of certain content, the acceptance or rejection
of various publishers.
What happens to the current class of news publishers is a much less important question than what kind of a news and information society we want to create and how can we help shape this.
Facebook is eating the world By Emily Bell March 7, 2016
Something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many.
Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information, and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential risks.
Journalism is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but one of central interest to citizens.
The internet and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work, while at the same time helping to make the business of publishing journalism an uneconomic venture.
Two significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention to:
First, news publishers have lost control over distribution.
Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.
Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies.
The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized.
There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK, disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies are failing.
The mobile revolution is behind much of this.
Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded.
The design and capabilities of our phones (thank you, Apple) favor apps, which foster different behavior. Google did recent research through its Android platform that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, and of those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of our time is spent on a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is far greater than any other social platform.
The majority of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.
So let’s recap: -People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything. -They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter. -The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.
The competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse”- Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in Microsoft) - are engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies, platforms, and even ideologies will win.
In the last year, journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict.
In the past year, Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice, BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up to all publishers in April. Apple and Google quickly followed suit, launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete stories about events.
It is very good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing.
At the same time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly into apps and new systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile audiences, Apple announced it would allow ad-blocking software to be downloaded from its App store.
In other words, if as a publisher your alternative to going onto a distributed platform is to make money through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block all ads and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook, are largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the already very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might be getting independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course, one might add that publishers had it coming from weighing down their pages with intrusive ads nobody wanted in the first place.
There are three alternatives for commercial publishers.
One is to push even more of your journalism straight to an app like Facebook and its Instant Articles where ad blocking is not impossible but harder than at the browser level. As one publisher put it to me, “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on the revenue and traffic from one distributor, are very high.
The second option is to build other businesses and revenues away from distributed platforms. Accept that seeking a vast audience through other platforms is not only not helping you but actively damaging your journalism, so move to a measurement of audience engagement rather than scale.
Membership or subscription are most commonly considered in this context. Ironically, the prerequisites for this are having a strong brand identity that subscribers feel affinity towards. In a world where content is highly distributed, this is far harder to achieve than when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in the handful of cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up the shortfall in advertising.
The third is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all, so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or “sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has grown to nearly a quarter of all digital display advertising in the US. In fact, digitally native companies like BuzzFeed, Vox, and hybrids like Vice, have disrupted the failing publishing model by essentially becoming advertising agencies—which are themselves in danger of failing. What I mean by this is that they deal directly with advertisers, they make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we see scattered all over our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all those people who have previously “liked” or shared other material from that publisher.
The logical answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest in their own destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app has to be compliant with the distribution standards of others in order to work. And investing in maintaining your own presence comes at a time when advertising (particularly in print) is under pressure, and online advertising is not growing either. The critical balance between destination and distribution is probably the hardest investment decision traditional publishers have to make right now.
Publishers are reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four times the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go “all in” on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism and stories that work on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production capacity, technology capacity, and even advertising departments, and delegating it all to third-party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat.
This is a high-risk strategy: You lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination.
With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online everyday, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this.
In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news. If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into the internal working of these systems.
There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound.
We are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable.
We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if they cannot be treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.
For this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that this is the outcome of their engineering success.
One of the criticisms thus far leveled against these companies is that they have cherry-picked the profitable parts of the publishing process and sidestepped the more expensive business of actually creating good journalism. If the current nascent experiments such as Instant Articles lead to a more integrated relationship with journalism, it is possible that we will see a more significant shift of production costs follow, particularly around technology and advertising sales.
The reintermediation of information, which once looked as though it was going to be fully democratized by the progress of the open Web, is likely to make the mechanisms for funding journalism worse before they get better. Looking at the prospects for mobile advertising and the aggressive growth targets Apple, Facebook, Google, and the rest have to meet to satisfy Wall Street, it is fair to say that unless social platforms return a great deal more money back to the source, producing news is likely to become a nonprofit pursuit rather than an engine of capitalism.
To be sustainable, news and journalism companies will need to radically alter their cost base. It seems most likely that the next wave of news media companies will be fashioned around a studio model of managing different stories, talents, and products across a vast range of devices and platforms. As this shift happens, posting journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned in favor of hyperdistribution. The distinction between platforms and publishers will melt completely.
Even if you think of yourself as a technology company, you are making critical decisions about everything from access to platforms, the shape of journalism or speech, the inclusion or banning of certain content, the acceptance or rejection of various publishers.
What happens to the current class of news publishers is a much less important question than what kind of a news and information society we want to create and how can we help shape this.
